The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/135206
ONLINE LEARNING COMPETITION Unlike MOOCs, language communities, such as busuu (bottom left) and babbel (bottom right) can be used on tablets (left) © ISTOCKphOTO Going global Like language learning communities, MOOCs depend on a strong community of users to offer peer learning as a substitute for the on-campus experience of study groups. Learners engage with each other in forum discussions, shared exercises and live chats. In some cases, professional language tutors or teachers are added to the mix to provide expert help and input. Language learning was a driving force in the early years of social, web-based learning. Learning a new language while helping others to learn yours is a proven model. Language learning communities offer the structure and tools to make the classic language exchange more effective and efficient. The drawback of language learning communities is their lack of reputation and, often, credibility compared with traditional and established institutions. You won't find renowned professors and linguists giving tutorials, and there isn't always certification. These startups weren't created to serve professors or institutions. Quite the opposite: they were created to be learner-centred and to give learners an alternative to the established, and often expensive, Rosetta Stone, pimsleur, Berlitz and Kaplan products. Vol/52 No/3 2013 Moving into Higher Education The consumer market was being challenged, but the higher Education vertical was still largely untapped. And this is where MOOC platforms came into the mix. They were founded on the premise of offering courses only from the world's most renowned colleges, universities and professors, with the aim of making world-class education accessible to people who could not otherwise afford it. Interestingly, language courses are virtually non-existent on Coursera, Udacity and edX – perhaps the three biggest platforms. We could ask ourselves why. Maybe it's to do with the founders' backgrounds in computer science or electrical engineering; or the current push for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects. In these times of budget cuts, many universities both in the US and in Europe are making cuts to their languages and arts departments first. Would it not be in their best interest to create dedicated MOOC courses for languages, rather than radically cutting down or closing entire departments? Although most MOOC platforms are still based in the US, we are now seeing more and more alternatives popping up across the globe, especially in Europe. The Germanbased iversity started out as a social network for academia before pivoting into the MOOC space. Then we have FutureLearn, a UK-based MOOC platform that is built on the Open University's 40 years of experience. In Finland, a team of former Nokia employees have launched Eliademy, a mix between a learning management system and a MOOC platform. iversity recently announced a partnership with the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft to fund ten MOOCs to the tune of €25,000 each. It is still relatively early days for MOOCs, so we may well see more initiatives in 2013. The latest in the club, Novo Ed, again comes from the US and, like Udacity and Coursera, it comes out of Stanford. There are two more MOOC-ish platforms that offer great potential. Veduca is a Brazilian platform. As all video lectures are published under a creative commons licence, the team took those freely available video lectures and added a portuguese transcription, opening up courses from top US universities to learners who don't speak or understand English. Veduca (www.veduca.com.br) has received funding from Macmillan Digital Education and will now expand its platform into other languages, including Spanish. There are also plans to record lectures at South American universities and transcribe them into English. Viki.com is also about adding transcriptions to existing videos, but the interesting twist is that those transcripts are crowdsourced by the Viki community. Anyone can participate in transcribing and translating videos from around the globe, which makes the site an interesting source for culture enthusiasts. Just one word of warning: don't go on Viki expecting to find a structured language course with modules that fit to the Common European Framework of Reference. Instead, you will find a large selection of original sources on your particular area of interest. JUNE/JULY The Linguist 17